I can’t remember a time in my life when the Kennedy’s weren’t part of the national imagination. I stuffed envelopes for JFK’s presidential candidacy at the Concourse Plaza Hotel in the Bronx.

I cheered JFK in a campaign parade on the Grand Concourse. I had a PT 109 Boat tie clasp. I believed that Robert F. Kennedy could get us out of Vietnam. Impossibly, after two brothers were gunned down, I believed that Teddy Kennedy could deliver us from the insanity.

I remember exactly where I was when …
• I got the news that President Kennedy had been shot;
• I watched in horror as the news came in that RFK had been assassinated;
• I was driving in my car and heard that Teddy Kennedy drove off a bridge and a girl drowned;
• I learned that JFK Jr. had gone down in a plane accident.

The Kennedy legacy doesn’t die with Edward M. Kennedy’s passing. Certainly, there are enough Kennedy progeny to stay the course and keep the family’s good work active. Just a few months ago, Maria Shriver produced an HBO series on Alzheimer’s Disease. This impacted our family personally as my mother-in-law had died just 2 months earlier from the disease.

Then there are her cousins: Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend – former Lt. Governor of Maryland, Congressman Patrick Kennedy, Joseph Kennedy II – former Congressman from Massachusetts and currently running Citizens Energy Corp., and RFK Jr. – founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance.

Teddy Kennedy, himself, leaves behind a monumental record of legislative achievement in civil rights, education, voting rights, labor reform and health care reform … an effort he called “the cause of my life.” He was the “Lion of the U.S. Senate.” He knew how to broker deals across both sides of the aisle. There are those who lament his absence right now at precisely the moment when health care legislation needs the practiced and steady hand of a master politician.

And, there was his role in helping to elect Barack Obama. “The dream never dies,” said Senator Kennedy at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. And, in so doing, he tacitly passed the mantle onto the nation’s first African-American president.

I think Teddy Kennedy’s life achievements were more profound. In the face of unspeakable family tragedy, he soldiered on. He became the center of the Kennedy clan for his children and nieces and nephews. He attended every one of those 22 kids’ graduations and major life events.

He lived through his own child’s bone cancer which cost the 12-year-old Edward Kennedy Jr. his leg. He gave away Caroline Kennedy at her wedding. He shored up his family when JFK Jr. went down in an airplane crash.

Edward M. Kennedy was not without his foibles and his own personal tragedy. He cheated on a test at Harvard in his freshman year and was expelled from the university. He was in a plane crash himself wherein his back and several ribs were broken and the accident left him with permanent back and neck problems.

The plane’s pilot as well as a Kennedy campaign aide was killed. His marriage to Joan Kennedy went sour and played itself out in the tabloids as she passed through alcohol rehab several times. Teddy Kennedy himself was reportedly an alcoholic and a womanizer.

And, then there was Chappaquiddick … a shameful and sordid incident wherein Mary Jo Kopechne drowned and Senator Kennedy failed to report the incident for almost 10 hours. It cast a pall over his reputation and dashed his hopes of ever winning the presidency.

Ironically, this may have been a good thing. He devoted himself to the U.S. Senate and his record stands now as the third longest serving senator in history (after Robert Byrd and Strom Thurmond.) More relevant to the Kennedy legacy, the eulogizers are already recounting his accomplishments as being substantively greater than his two brothers ever achieved.

Returning to his family achievements, however, I find his devotion to keeping the fabric of the Kennedy clan intact to be more laudable than his legislative record. Loyalty to his brothers’ memory was palpable.

At RFK’s funeral, Teddy was both loving and eloquent. He asked us not idealize or enlarge Robert Kennedy in death but to remember him “simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.” And, in the shadow, lurked the memory of JFK and the eldest brother, Joseph, who died in World War II on a bombing mission at the age of 29.

Here, the relevance gets very personal. My father also had an older brother, Joseph, who was singled out by the Nazis to be killed in reprisal for some slight to the Germans in their Polish village during World War II. I never met my uncle Joseph (also in his late 20’s) just like Teddy Kennedy never really knew his oldest brother.

Yet, both families’ allegiance to the memory of the slain firstborn son is poignant to me. My father and his brother were never far from the influence their oldest brother, Joseph, had on their lives. Teddy Kennedy was never far from his brothers’ significance either.

Rest in peace, Brother Edward. You left the world a better place than you found it.

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” -- Ernest Hemingway.